I have been playing the hell out of City of Heroes over the last month or two. I have enjoyed it but will be happy to move on to something else.. City of heroes is one of my “stand by” games. I find that I always come back to it simply because its quite mindless.. Good but simple..

Or is it? The more I play it the more I find super secret hidden stuff that is in the background. I’m discovering that there is a lot of depth in the game that I never realized was there.

It made me realize that CoH/CoV took the EQ1 style of game play to heart, instead of the WoW style. Meaning that in World of Warcraft if the guy standing there doesn’t have an exclamation or question mark over his head – you don’t need to talk to him, ever..

In EQ1 that wasn’t the case at all.. In fact if you didn’t talk to just about everyone, you missed all the good quests. I think it added a lot to the sense of accomplishment, but the cost of having to run around and talk to everyone was pretty high and kinda sucked.

City of Heroes has both methods employed. You have a list of contacts which you can talk to or even call in order to do quests.. but there are also super secret ninja monkey heroes in the world that you have to go find.. This means that there are levels of depth to the game – you don’t have to do the super secret stuff.. or you can.. You choose.

That’s pretty cool. Plus with the invention system and the set powers they have going now, you can further refine your characters abilities. You don’t have to..but you can if you want to.. The neat thing about the set inventions is that they get stupidly powerful..

I recently got my toon fully outfitted with the “Blizzard” power with a complete set on it. Aim + Build up + Ice Storm + Blizzard… wow.. lots of shit dies very quickly. Suddenly that pack of 20 orange mobs isn’t a problem, and I’m just one guy.

It’s a fun game.. but eventually I’ll get tired of it and cancel my account… until I need something new and reactivate it.. haha.. I have done this like 5 times at this point..

Currently I am trying to get City of Heroes to work under Ubuntu. I’m going through another cycle where windows has pissed me off, so back to Ubuntu. I’ve already replaced my secondary computer with a mac mini (formerly an old windows box), if windows doesn’t knock it off I’ll just stay Ubuntu.

Either way it shouldn’t be too hard – I’ll keep you posted. Right now its downloading. 2.5 gigs takes a little while. I tried the “move it from the windows partition” trick but the patcher just didn’t understand. So fine.. download the thing again.. whatever..

Ps. Whatever you do – don’t install Vista. And don’t install IE8 on XP. Wine runs most windows programs better than windows. As soon as I get a couple more of them working I may not go back.

Update: Well it works. I don’t know why it surprises me but it always does.. I guess I’m still programmed to think that you have to have the OS printed on the box in order to run the application..

I had to completely reinstall it from the updater which confused me because it was replacing the exact same files with brand new files.. in the same place.. shrug Oh well it took an hour longer than I had anticipated.. wooptie do..

It works very smoothly and so far I can’t tell that I’m not in windows.. Wine, rocks.

The only bug is that the mouse cursor looks like its been “de-interlaced”.. After doing some looking, this is a known issue and one I care less about.  It still works just fine, it just looks like the mouse has been sliced up horizontally..